Double_R

I have critiqued Trump multiple times in this thread.

The most damming criticism of Trump you’ve offered in this thread is to say his stimulus spending was retarded, not exactly a full throated condemnation and wasn’t even made to me. If you’re going to argue that I’m being dishonest then consider what you’ve said to me, because I’m not going back and reading every post you’ve made.

Regardless, my comments to you were specific to what we’re discussing. I don’t care if you condemn Trump in some areas, we’re talking specifically about his authoritarianism/fascism, and with regards to that topic, your arguments are indistinguishable from any other Trump cultist I’ve argued with. You’ve given all the classics;

1. We voted for him, so that makes his actions ok
2. You set the standard where only complete catastrophe justifies outrage “our democratic-republic is not going to die because of Trump.”
3. You pretend that him hiring a weekend Fox News host to be secretary of defense, a couple of podcasters to run the FBI, a vaccine conspiracist with no medical expertise to run HHS, among many others I could name, is just him making hiring decisions like any other president
4. You invoked the we’re not mind reader’s defense to avoid inferring his intent

None of these are serious arguments, and when taken in totality the only through line here is unfalsifiability. If you want to show that to be wrong, perhaps you could tell us what Trump would have to do for you to accept that he is an authoritarian on a level very different from any other president we’ve seen.

"Laying out the dots"... If no pillar is strong enough to stand on its own, how can they hold a roof? They can't. You're asking me to accept the validity of arguments based on the number of them.

Starting here because this is fundamental. This is a classic logical fallacy where you set an impossible standard that each pillar must prove the argument on its own, then claim because because none of them meet that impossible standard they are all illegitimate and must all be discarded. That’s not how logic works.

Even all of these, in totality, do not prove a thing, because the fact that he can do all of these without dismantling the system remains.

Here you’re appealing to possibility, not probability. Anything is possible, that does nothing to help us understand what is likely correct (which is where Occam’s razor comes in). It’s just another rhetorical throw away.

The problem here is that we're not dealing with murder; we're dealing with what is, at best, speculation into his mind. You are not a mind reader.

Another classic. We’re talking about the man’s intent, which is inferred through his actions. You do not need to be a mind reader to know that when someone jump’s off a building that they didn’t want to live.

This retort is one I find especially baffling, not only because it’s one of the most basic skills that we use every single day of our lives, but because the people saying this never seem to have a problem inferring intent when it’s a Democrat. From “the Biden crime family” to “Kamala hates America” to whatever, when it’s someone you don’t like I’m quite sure you would have no problem “reading their mind”.

we are built so that, in times when the masses are wrong, the representatives and other elected officials do what is wise.

Correct, which is exactly the problem I am raising with Trump. But I’ll get back to that, for now this is yet another attempt by you to muddy the waters so that nothing Trump could ever do would be a problem for you. Under this framing, what’s “wise” is whatever the dear leader says it is, because he’s the one we elected to tell us so.

The point of this is not to justify, but rather to note that our democratic-republic is not going to die because of Trump.

Whether it will or will not die under him is kind of besides the point. He’s the president of the United States. He, more than anyone else on earth, is supposed to be the primary protector of our constitutional republic. To defend his ascension to the office is like defending the bank robber who was just hired to be head of security at your jewelry store. Sure, there’s other security guards there, sure there’s a system in place to stop him if he tries to steal, and maybe it all turned out ok in the end… it’s still a really f$&@ing stupid decision.

If you are a president, why hire/appoint "public servants" who won't easily go along with your policies? Why keep them on your staff?

You continue to deflect from the conversation. No one is claiming Trump is wrong because he hired his own people, that’s just stupid. Every president does that. We’re talking about the quality of people, what’s different about this particular group, why they were hired, what this tells us about Trump, and why it is ultimately very dangerous.

Let’s use Pete Hegseth as an example. A weekend Fox News host who has no senior leadership of any kind to be the secretary of defense. Of all the qualified people Trump could have chosen he chose this guy? Why? Military strength? No, that’s absurd. He chose him because he wanted someone who would do whatever he said, because he learned in his first term that experienced professionals who know better will push back.

So when Trump told them to shoot protesters in the leg? These guys will do it. When Trump decided to launch illegal military strikes? These guys will not push back. When Trump tells them to cease voting machines in swing states that voted for a democrat? These guys will do it.

We're not talking about differences in opinion - should we arm Ukraine or not? We’re talking about whether the people he hires are there to serve the American people, or to serve him. The latter cannot be excused away by arguing we voted for it. No, we certainly did not.

At the end of the day, the argument is that Trump's personnel changes indicate he is trying to form a dictatorship.

Let me clarify this, again. The argument is that the personnel decisions he’s made demonstrate a mentality at odds with the fundamental values of democracy. It’s not a single point that proves he’s trying to “form a dictatorship”, it’s an example that fits into a very clear pattern of behavior which, when considered in totality, make it clear he is trying to steer the US government in the direction where he has total say. Why? Because that’s the through line of nearly every major decision he’s made since January 20th.

Curious about your examples.

Start with birth right citizenship.

Again, citation needed.

Examples of using state power to punish those who defy him: going after law firms who represented adversarial clients, Harvard, signing executive orders to strip funding from “sanctuary cities”, threatening to withhold disaster aid from California, threatening to withhold funding from New York if they voted for Mamdani… there’s more, you want me to continue?

I will ask, however: Do you condemn the Biden administration for pressuring Twitter and Facebook to censor conservative viewpoints?

No. What the Biden administration did is at worst inadvisable, and honestly that’s only because of what bad faith republicans would try to make out of it.

What the Biden admin did was that they tried to pressure social media companies into censoring certain posts containing what they deemed COVID misinformation. These allegations involve questionable persuasion; the Trump allegations involve actual government censorship using the FCC.

But far worse is why. Even if we accept the worst about Biden allegations, they were acting in response to a health pandemic by trying to fight back against misinformation that would cost American lives. That’s not in the same ballpark as Trump’s FCC using state power to punish people because they had the nerve to criticize Trump. Biden even at worst was serving the American people, Trump was using state power to serve himself.

Not comparable.

democracy in America is a god that has failed.

I wouldn’t put that in past tense just yet, but to the extent it has failed I attribute that to the fact that for the past 45 years half of our government has been controlled by a party is that is effectively anti government. Turns out that lawmakers whose political ethos is that government can’t solve problems because government is the problem, are not very good at using government to solve our problems. Who knew?

Your sources lied to you when it said Hillary would win and when it said Kamala would win. How long will you believe them before you wake up?

First of all, “my sources” are the voters themselves telling us through an aggregate of polling data what they intend to do.

Second, these sources didn’t “tell me” that Clinton and Harris would win. In 2016 they predicted Clinton would win giving her about a 5:1 odds. Spend a few minutes with some dice and see how often those odds are defied. With Kamala it was much closer than that.

Maybe they are right this time but if they lied to you twice before by manipulating the pills, why trust them now?

Projection at its finest.

Simply trusting people you find credible is what you apparently do. I follow data and apply it. In these most recent elections, the polls were off… in the republican’s favor, so democrats won even bigger than expected. That’s what happens when you have a much higher than normal enthusiasm gap than normal, but polls can’t take that into account because then they would be making polling results up.

The enthusiasm gap is key. CNN just reported that, based on polling data, democratic identifying voters who said they planned to vote in the midterms just surpassed Republican identifying voters for the first time this century. That didn’t even happen in 2006 or 2018 when democrats destroyed republicans, so unless things change soon, everything at our disposal tells us this will be a gargantuan year for democrats.

And when you take a minute to think about it, it all makes perfect sense. Trump is the most unpopular president in our lifetimes in that even a large swath of his own voters despise him. The only reason they voted for him is because they believed he was going to turn things around for them, but that’s not happening and there’s no sign it will in the foreseeable future. Once you strip that away, the man has nothing left to offer but a contemptible personality. That’s not going to end well for his party.

Other than subsidised healthcare for the poor, what good exactly will come from a Dem win, policy-wise?

In 2026, nothing really, that’s kind of the point. Democratic leaning voters are enthusiastic not about what the democrats will do for them, but what they will be able to stop Trump from doing and for the fact that they will have oversight power where they will be able to investigate and put a spotlight on this administration’s abhorrent corruption and abuse of power.

Democrats are leading republicans by about 4 points nationally in generic ballot polling and democrats are up by almost 20 points in enthusiasm.

If Trump’s tariffs don’t start working fast it’ll be a tsunami in 26.

If being right wing means you scapegoat, then…

I didn’t say anything remotely like this. Let this be the latest example of how you don’t read, which explains why you remain toxically ignorant.

Well authoritarianism and authority are good; it just means you have laws.

OMG. No, that’s not what it means. Authoritarianism is about consolidating power so that the leader becomes the law.

Laws that are not enforced are just words on a piece of paper, that’s why authoritarians hire based on loyalty instead of competence - so that they can do whatever they want and no one stands up to them. That’s the whole point.

Trump is not a Monarch; Canada is more of a monarchy than the US

We’re not talking about the current structure of the US government, we’re talking about Trump’s political ideology. That would have been obvious if you bothered to pay attention to what I’ve been writing.

George Bush scaped goated gays

Bush did not spend an entire political campaign convincing his base that the gays were the reasons for all of their problems and promising to end them once he got into office. The latter is called fascism. The former is a bad faith false equivalence.

If you think right wingers like me are unserious, then congrats; politics is no longer your thing and you should quit it.

That is a remarkably stupid sentence.

If you wish to be taken seriously then make serious arguments. That’s how it works. But instead we get this…

Your pain is America's pleasure, all right wingers are proud and unashamed bullies and trolls. We don't care if the Leopard eats our face as long as it eats the face of whiny left wingers.

That is the definition of unserious.

And I will never absorb it.

Yeah, you have made that obvious.

Give up on me

Oh, I already have. Did you think I was replying for you?

What horror?

The first tenet of fascism is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is about eroding democratic institutions to consolidate power within a single individual. Examples of this include Trump firing nearly every inspector general within the DOJ - effectively creating open season on corruption, weaponizing the DOJ to go after all of his political enemies while letting his allies get away with any and everything, and installing unqualified loyalists into massively important positions.

Beyond that, probably the single greatest identifier of fascism is scapegoating, which he is doing with undocumented immigrants by overtly lying about them being criminals when that does not represent the bulk of them, and then using that false stereotype he crafted to justify his blatant inhumane treatment of them.

Another major tenet is silencing by punishing his opposition. The Jimmy Kimmel example holds, Liz Cheney and Adam Kissinger are also great examples. But a lesser known example I think spells it out perfectly would be the two DOJ prosecutors he recently had fired for describing January 6th as a riot in court documents referring to two J6 rioters accused of committing further crimes after he pardoned them.

And then there’s the glorification of the military by throwing parades and using them like his personal tweet toy in major US cities in order to show off his own strength.

I could go on, but you haven’t absorbed a word of this.

HAHA no you guys dont

Wow, you really owned the lib on that one.

Name a smart right winger.

There are a lot of smart right wingers, Ben Shapiro is the first that comes to mind.

My issue isn’t that wingers are stupid people, it’s that they hold and defend stupid political views. I watched a debate with Shapiro and Destiny where Shapiro explained his defense of Trump by saying he doesn’t hold his 9 year old to the same standards as his 5 year old. In other words, he’s arguing that because Trump hasn’t shown himself to be up to the standards of other presidents, it’s reasonable to hold him to a lesser standard. That’s insanely stupid.

The issue isn’t intelligence, it’s the way bias warps the human mind into accepting a different cognitive approach to a particular issue that we wouldn’t apply anywhere else in life.

Fascism = scary word for right wing politics.

The power of connotations should be removed.

Fascism isn’t being uttered against Trump and MAGA because it sounds scary. It’s being uttered because that’s what Trump and his movement is.

The connotation shouldn’t be removed, the connotation was created by the horror of the very things Trump is doing right now, it’s just a question of whether you are able to see it. But because of things like the Shapiro example above, once your mind is that warped, you won’t.

All right wing things are dumb to you

All? No. Most? Uh… yeah, that’s why I’m not on the right.

None of this is relevant to the fact that you literally just tried to argue that fascism and human rights are on the same level according to the constitution. That’s a remarkably dumb thing to say regardless of how much of a political hack you wish to accuse me of being.

The framers were fascists; they had slaves.

So you don’t know what a fascist is. Got it.

Some governments have 340 million people; others 10 million; others 1 million; others 100k people; others 10k people; others 10 people, others 1 person. Every person is their own government.

If you don’t have something serious to say why bother?

America was founded on equality (ideological equality, meaning facsism and human rights were on an equal playing field).

This is one of the dumbest things you’ve ever posted.

The framers created the constitution explicitly to fight back against authoritarianism (which is a tenet of fascism), so the idea that the framers held fascism in equal regard to any other ideology is absurd.

The most important (first) amendment protects freedom of speech

Correct… from the government. The 1A doesn’t exist to protect ideologies, it exists to prevent government officials from using state power to silence critics.

I didn’t ask, but thanks for that I guess

Is there anything you can point to that says Trump has an enabling act of some kind in place?

The point wasn’t that Trump passed an enabling act of his own, the point is the fact that Trump was elected democratically doesn’t make his actions democratic.

Examples of anti democratic things he has done include staffing the government with loyalists over public servants, passing executive orders that blatantly violate the constitution, violating due process rights for undocumented immigrants, overtly weaponizing the DOJ and FCC, using the power of the state to punish those that do not abide by him including threats to blue states for supporting democrats, etc.

If electing the wrong person can ruin the system, the system was in shambles long before the wrong person was elected.

Every system is vulnerable so long as there is a person at the top of it, and I hate to tell you, but we haven’t figured out how to not have systems run by people.

Ensuring the right people are in charge is and will always be central to whether any country remains a legitimate democracy, that’s not avoidable.

I've seen multiple people claim he is

Probably randos on Twitter. Regardless, no serious person would make this claim. Almost certainly, if you’ve heard anyone say it they were being hyperbolic or describing his mentality, not literally saying the US is a dictatorship.

Some personnel changes from the first term don't make for an attempt at a dictatorship.

Typical MAGA intellectual dishonesty. No one is claiming “personnel changes” makes a dictatorship. The point of highlighting the personnel decisions he has made is to demonstrate that this isn’t a man who cares about serving the people who elected him, otherwise he would install people who know how to do that. Instead he’s installing people whose sole qualification is that they’re a Trump sycophant. That is just one of the many things Trump has done that we’ve seen in authoritarian regimes many times before.

I was looking to hear that Trump was in the process of getting his enabling act in place, and all I got was this. His favorite tie changed from what it was in 2017; he's clearly a different person who's become ready to start a dictatorship.

It’s all you’re going to get because it’s all you want. you like to do what every MAGA cultist does; you compartmentalize everything he does so that you can claim each thing fails on its own to prove the point, then dismiss them all claiming there’s no evidence of it. That’s brazenly dishonest, logic doesn’t work that way. The way you prove a case is by laying out the dots and then connecting them. The connecting is not something I can do for you.

People don't vote D or R based on the economy. They vote on social issues.

Projection. Right wingers vote based on social issues because that's what animates them. It's why we on the left always talk about the right and their culture war BS. We see it for what it is, a distraction so the wealthy can continue to rob the working class blind.

Old and outdated video, but think of Tucker as the poster child of right wing politics and it explains the right perfectly.

https://youtu.be/RNineSEoxjQ?si=WERtFVJ-ZeaGIJ65

If someone robs a candy bar, then they won't get punished, so it's basically legal (illegal but unenforced is de facto legal).

Now you're just pretending that you didn't make the argument you did before.

Stealing a candy bar is not legal, we just don't treat it as seriously as we do other forms of theft because it's not as serious, despite the fact that they both exist on the spectrum of theft.

What forms of rape would you convict people for?

I would have a spectrum of charges to convict for to match the spectrum of seriousness of possible rape crimes.

Please tell me what Trump's enabling acts are.

So you didn't bother to Google it, noted.

The Enabling Act was the law Hitler was able to get passed that allowed him to take the powers he would then use to dismantle Germany's democracy, thereby paving the way for the holocaust.

The point was in direct refutation of your implied claim that because a president was elected and is doing what he said he would do that everything he does is definitionally democratic. That's just silly and contradicts the fundamental purpose of having a constitution.

If he is a dictator, every president prior with his powers is also one.

No one is claiming Trump *is* a dictator, we're saying he is a clear authoritarian who wants to be a dictator. And we're saying it because it's beyond obvious.

But are you going to honestly advocate for such powers to be taken away for all presidents for good

In some cases absolutely. I would love to see a constitutional amendment formally establishing the independence of the DOJ for example. It's absurd that the only thing stopping president's from directly interfering in criminal prosecutions and weaponizing the DOJ against anyone who crosses him is how's own personal restraint.

I'm not sure how many other measures I would take though, this is the problem; Presidents have to be able to act when necessary, but granting that authority to the wrong person opens the system up to flagrant abuse and the endangerment of our entire system of constitutional governance. This is why it matters who we put in that position, but unfortunately Americans demonstrated in 2024 that we're just not smart enough to make that choice. At the end of the day, we get the government we deserve.

And you can keep claiming that Trump is oh so different this year

I can claim? Are you seriously going to sit here and pretend Trump 2.0 is no different than Trump 1.0? A Fox News weekend host to be secretary of defense, a notorious vaccine conspiracy theorist to lead HHS, a couple of podcasters to run the FBI... Really?

What’s your point?

Feel free to tell me what it is

You sure are romantic.

If that’s all you got out of it it’s no wonder you had to ask.

Maximally great idea is same as maximally great being.

No, they’re not.

Google “idea”, then google “being”.

Note the differences in their definition.

In other words, it is not possible to say that a maximally great idea doesnt exist, because to do so would require statement to contain both maximal greatness and more than maximal greatness, which is not logically possible.

Sure ok.

In other words, it is not possible to claim that maximally great being doesnt exist.

How did we get from “idea” to “being”?

If your goal is to get laid, of course it’s easier if you are a girl. Dating is a whole other story, because men and women are completely different.

As men, what we want from a woman is their body, so to get that, we need to give them is our attention. This is where things like flowers to show to we’re thinking about them, spending time with them on the phone, etc. all come in. If you’re not giving them your attention, you’re not separating yourself from any other man.

As women, what they want from a man is their attention, so the way they get that is with their bodies. Now they can’t just give it all up because then they’ll be nothing left, so they have to do it one piece at a time. It starts with makeup and a nice outfit to accentuate their curves. Eventually it will move on to touching, revealing selfies, etc. The better job you do, the more access you get. Their bodies their reward to you, and in turn is what separate themselves to you.

Dating and all of its dynamics make perfect sense when you think of it through the lenses of evolution. Men are bigger and stronger, so we’re the providers. Women bear children, so they’re the nurturers.

Men get to spread their seed, so we want to sleep with as many girls as we can. Women have to carry that seed for 9 months, and are then left with the child, so they are extremely selective.

When men decide to get selective, being the providers, we supply ourselves with what we need to survive, so we look for physical traits in the woman which signify health, increasing the chances of healthy offspring.

Women care about that too, but for them survival is far more dependent on picking a man that can provide and protect her and her offspring, not to mention one that will stick around to do that.

So basically, it’s just biology combined with the realities of life in earth. Moral of the story is that if you think women have it easier it’s probably because you haven’t thought about their point of view very well.

“Save democracy” lmao

The leader elected in a democratic election is a threat to democracy because he… uses powers given to him as president, the position he was elected to serve in.

Google the enabling act of 1933

It’s even funnier when you remember we had one term of Trump already. The camps did not open; the sky did not fall.

I would go through the spiel of how Trump in his first term surrounded himself with adults who believed in the constitution and how even he has said he won’t make that mistake again, but we’ve already lived through 10 months of an administration that looks absolutely nothing like the first.

At this point, your ignorance is a choice.

Im trying not to defend rape, but if rape is on a spectrum, then even consensual sex is rape

Every crime has a spectrum of some kind, that’s why we have judges and in some jurisdictions juries who decide on sentences.

Stealing a candy bar is not the same thing as robbing a bank, so theft has a spectrum.

Killing someone is manslaughter, killing someone’s with malice or forethought is murder, so even unaliving others has a spectrum.

The existence of a spectrum doesn’t make any action better or worse.

Why would you be surprised by it, historically almost all fascist movements insisted that their opposition are communists.

I never said surprised, I said amazed, referring to the human capacity to remain in a state of intellectual dishonesty. It’s remarkable.

The word "progressive" was in group signalling when it was harder to admit being a Marxist in the 60s but nearly every current Democrat openly calls themselves progressive.

Democrats call themselves progressive because that’s a clear description of what their beliefs amount to. It’s origins as you described, even if represented accurately (which I am skeptical about but not interested in checking), are irrelevant.

Marketing speak. We know where it leads.

Paranoia is not knowledge.

Even then working with capitalism undermines it. It is far better to be completely socialist or completely capitalist (free market). You can't have a system work if it is logically inconsistent.

And yet every developed nation on earth runs on some combination of socialism and capitalism.

There is nothing logically inconsistent about a system where the means of production is privately owned while government puts measures in place to reduce poverty and increase upward mobility. It’s been working for us for the past century.

the right has been backed into a corner where we have to choose between fascism or turn the country into California were the cops can't arrest thieves if they steal less than $200, where crime is high due to immigration, where pedophilia has essentially been legalized and where parents will get arrested for not affirming their male child is a girl.

There’s a football field’s worth of middle ground between the two, and that’s setting aside the outright delusions you just spouted.

Why are you a liberal anyway is your only argument "gee I don't like the personality of trump because he mentioned having secure borders and criticized NAFTA in a way that sounds jingoistic"

If you have a serious question to ask I’d be happy to provide a serious answer.

I am interested to see how this plays out. NYC elected a self described hard core socialist/communist. It has been argued at nausium that socialism/communism hasn't worked

Setting aside the blatant lie the right keeps repeating about the American left being communists… the constant labeling, fixation, and demonization of democrats as socialists never ceases to amaze me.

You guys don’t even know what these words mean. A “democratic socialist” is someone who believes government has a large role to play in fighting back against the excesses which capitalism naturally produces. That’s not anti-capitalist, it works with capitalism.

Actual socialism is when the government takes control over the means of production. Ironically, the only examples we’ve seen in that in recent years is under the current president where he has I believe twice now had the federal government take a stake in large companies as part of his deal making.

So apparently, if you’re so against socialism, vote blue.

"proper discipline" as you call it, isn't a trigger word, nor does it rely on luck.

This has nothing to do with this conversation. It was literally just a qualifier I put in to be clear that not everyone who gets their hands on a large amount of money will use it to make money, a qualifier I only have to put in because people like you love to ignore the obvious and seize on silly things like that to avoid dealing with the central point.

And yet here you are, despite the effort to cut that off at the outset, still trying to seize on it to avoid dealing with the central point.

This is when I start using ad Homs, because any real attempt at intellectual conversation is pointless.

Maybe start blaming Americans for being stupid.

I do, I’ve talked about it many times. Two things can both be true.

trump was just smart enough to profit from their stupidity. I am glad you think trump is smart.

Profiting off of stupid people is neither a sign of intelligence nor is it impressive. To the extent it measures anything it’s depravity, and in Trump’s case there’s certainly no shortage on that.

Trump is the product of a perfect storm that all came together to lift him up. He inherited much of his wealth, which he then combined with his ego and narcissism to make other people think he was some real estate genius by putting his name everywhere. Then TV producers decided to utilize the false image he created and bolster him in the process. Then his pathological lying combined with his ability to sense a sucker lead to him conning people into thinking he was the solution to their problems. Problems created by years of the wealthy controlling an increasingly large portion of our economy while leaving everyone else behind. All of this made the country ripe for a figure just like him.

No one else could get away with what he did. He’s a moron who sounds like a moron, but stupid people believe him where others would be laughed off the stage because of his image as a genius which was created by TV and propaganda over the prior 40 years.

Good luck replacing that.

Funny that you bring up the lottery as the behavior of an undisciplined budgeter.

No, that’s not all at what I did. You would know that if you’d bother to pay attention to my words instead of just skimming for trigger words and phrases to respond to.